Progressing on the Spiritual Path

Questioner: Sadhguru, what should I do to progress rapidly on the spiritual path and live joyfully and well?

Sadhguru: First of all, your priorities must be set. Do not think of what kind of things you want; just see how you want to be and work towards that. Things will arrange themselves anyway, according to your skill, your capability, and the situation in which you exist. Rather than thinking what kind of house to live in, what kind of thing to do, just say “I want to be spiritually focused and I want to live joyfully and well.” Other things will arrange themselves around that. Maybe you will walk ten miles every day and enjoy that or maybe you will drive a BMW or maybe you will ride a bicycle – that’s not the important thing. The important thing is that you are going about your life joyfully, enjoying every bit of it. Isn’t that the most important thing? Other things are only arrangements. But when people have no sense of wellbeing within themselves, their only way to be well is to be better than someone else.

You wanting to be better than somebody is a sickness – it is not wellbeing. This sickness has caught the world so badly. People want to own so many things, only because no one else can have them. Suppose I give you the biggest diamond in the world, if you were a human being who just looks at this, it is just a stone. Only in the marketplace they made it such a big thing. A simple granite stone that you find on the street, if you look at it carefully enough, is equally beautiful in a different way. But there are too many granite stones, so you won’t pick it up. There are a few diamonds on the planet and everybody cannot have them, so you hang it around your neck or on your nose or on your ears. Not because it’s beautiful – don’t believe such things.

Human life has gotten poisoned with wrong ideas about life. Just trying to be better than somebody, how many human beings have destroyed themselves! How many human beings have wasted their lives on this planet just trying to look a little better than somebody else! Don’t waste your life trying to look better than somebody else. It is such a horrible waste of life, because you will never blossom into your full potential if you keep thinking how to be better than somebody. Fix the priority of your life and leave it. Do the best that you can – what has to happen will happen.

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